Quranic Truth and the Meaning of Dhimma

by abdal hakim murad

Foreword by Dr Umar Faruq Abd-Allah

KAL AM RE SEAR CH & M ED IA

K N OWLE D G E VI LL AGE , D UB AI

Quranic Truth and the Meaning of Dhimma

by abdal hakim murad
Foreword by Dr Umar Faruq Abdullah

KA L AM RESE AR CH & M ED IA
K N OW LE D GE VI LL AGE, DUB AI

Kalam Research & Media Block 3, 1st Floor, Executive Office 09 P.O. Box 502221, Knowledge Village, Dubai Tel: +971 (0)434 2379 www.kalamresearch.com Text 2010. Abdal Hakim Murad. All rights reserved. Design 2010. Kalam Research & Media. All rights reserved. The Publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of the author. Cover Image Corbis Design and typesetting by Sohail Nakhooda at Kalam Research & Media, Dubai Printed in the UAE

Contents

Foreword by Dr Umar Faruq Abd-Allah Quranic Truth and the Meaning of Dhimma About the Author

5 7 20

Foreword
by Dr Umar Faruq Abd-Allah Director, The Nawawi Foundation

bdal hakim murad stands out as one of the most learned, enlightened, and honest Muslim voices in the West today. Over the last several years, he has exercised a profound inuence on the emerging Muslim communities of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, setting forth courageously the integrity and authenticity of the living tradition of Sunni Islam in the face of ignorance and extremism. This short essay, Quranic truth and the meaning of dhimma, is a concise and remarkably rich theological statement exploring the dynamic possibilities of an authentically Islamic universality for our age. Whereas modern globalism tends to annihilate cultural diversity, authentic Islamic pluralism as exemplied in the theological implications of dhimma offers to each community the opportunity to develop its own sacred space and express its own uniqueness. This vision of Islamic pluralism would seek to invigorate the world community through enriching communal diversity instead of destroying it. The article touches on a number of other crucial topics such as the meaning of authenticity in tradition, the imperative of morally-based religious interpretation (ijtihd), the true valuation of the Other based on the Ishmaelite universalism of the Islamic religious vision, the moral and intellectual dilemma of much contemporary Arab and Arabocentric Salast thought, the rich potential of the non-Arab legacy within Islam, and the dilemma of modern globalisation. It illustrates the unparalleled theological potential of Islam today to foster a modular alternative to globalism based on what Arnold Toynbee referred to as the Islamic tradition of the brotherhood of Man. ;

Dr. Umar F. Abd-Allah is Director of the Nawawi Foundation, Chicago. His seminal biography of Mohammed Webb (d. 1916), one of the most signicant early American converts to Islam, is titled A Muslim in Victorian America: The Story of Alexander Russell Webb (Oxford University Press). Dr. Abd-Allahs doctoral dissertation on Imam Mlik is forthcoming, and he is also completing a second work entitled Roots of Islam in America: A Survey of Muslim Presence in the New World from Earliest Evidence until 1965.

Quranic Truth and the Meaning of Dhimma

by Abdal Hakim Murad Dean, The Cambridge Muslim College

theatre. One of these re-enacts for the faithful Christian the self-giving of Christ, the pascal lamb sacriced Abrahamically. The Oberammergau Passion Play is probably the best-known survival of this genre, in which the miscreants are the incarnate Gods Jewish persecutors, who thus incur the blood curse pronounced in Matthew 27:25, which entails their eternal exile from promise and covenant. The other, less well-known, is the moros y cristianos genre of Spain and her former American colonies. In these plays, popular mainly in rural communities, white-faced Christians celebrate their expulsion of black-faced Moors. This is, in a sense, a re-enactment of the sacrice of Ishmael, who is here expelled from European soil, just as the half-Egyptian Ishmael of Genesis was driven forever from the sight of Abraham, and excluded from the promise. In recent decades, alternative readings of the Bible have radically interrogated and redened both of these ritual dramas. Late twentieth-century Christian theology made much of those passages in Paul which seem to imply an ongoing divine favour upon Israel. And if the rightful dismissal of the Moriscos is to be a latter-day re-enactment of the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness, then we will need an explanation of the Genesis text that insists that, in Gods words, Ishmael will be the father of a great nation (17:20). In other words, Oberammergau and the Reconquista dramas represent two ancient exclusions which turn out Biblically to be not difcult to oppose. It is a serious rereading, and no mere assertion of the primacy of liberal reason, which discovers that scriptural antecedents condently taken for generations as the paradigm of exclusion turn out to hold rich potential for hospitality and inclusion. One outcome of this re-examination has been the removal from the Oberammergau script of traditional themes which have caused dismay to Jewish believers. The Jewish players no longer wear horned hats to signify their allegiance to the devil; and in 2000 the blood curse itself was deleted.1 In Spain, and in other parts where the anti-Ishmaelite legend is still commemorated, it is interesting that most local people now volunteer to play
For the controversy see Leonard Swidler, The Passion of the Jew Jesus: Recommended Changes in the Oberammergau Passion Play after 1984, Anti-Defamation League, New York, 1984; James Shapiro, Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the Worlds Most Famous Passion Play, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2001. Hitler had praised the play in 1934. The Blood Curse was also removed, amid some bitterness, from the English subtitles of the 2003 lm The Passion of the Christ.
1

urope could be said to dene its boundaries through two genres of sacred

the parts of the Muslims, not of their Christian vanquishers. They prefer the colourful Moorish costumes, it seems; and like the new generation in many modern places, they are able to identify with non-white suffering at the hands of powerful white rulers.2 Of course, not all these shifts are rooted in a deep theological awareness among Bavarian or Andalusian villagers of the doctrinal movements that have guided their leaders towards a greater hospitality to difference. Yet a sea-change has taken place, and it evidently need not be in a secular direction. Instead, there has been a ressourcement, a re-sourcing, a new quarrying, of old, ultimately scriptural stories, to nd neglected grounds for the challenging of an ancient exclusion. It is in this spirit of faithfulness to scripture, I believe, that Muslims need to continue their re-imagining of the Islamic project for a society that satises Gods demands for morality and justice. We are called to be authenticsuch is the valid assurance of Muslim revivalists everywherebut we are also called to be a visible sign of the Islamic summons to moral living. Most modern Muslim fundamentalist preaching has allowed Islam to veil God, and thus to veil ethics; and clings to signs whose meaning is not morally the same as what it once was. Its vision of history can often seem no more hospitable than that of the old Christian passion plays. In particular, it has failed to see that identity movements, by their nature, cannot defend authenticity, because they remake it in the act of dening it as authentic. The task of Islamic renewal today must be to maintain the unselfconsciousness of tradition; and this cannot be accomplished through ideology or through the blind replication of a medieval exegesis which responded to circumstances which are not our own. Our tradition has many mansions, but nally, it is to be God-oriented and scripturedirected. In this perspective, the process by which the Law is found and interpreted (ijtihd) is a theological practice, determined by our understanding of Gods purposes, both in the visible world, and in the capacities of the human mind and conscience. Muslims, in their engagement with non-Muslim participants in society, are therefore intensely mukallafn, charged before God to bear witness in the ux of Gods creation to the primordial unity and ethical perfection which, like all humanity, they beheld before eneshmentthe day of the alastu bi-rabbikum, Am I not your Lord? (7:172). In this essay I do not propose to focus on minority-related details of Islamic law (qh alaqalliyt), a task which lies in any case beyond my competence, but rather to raise some larger, metahistorical issues implicit in scripture whose neglect has often barred modern qh discussions from remaining faithful to the primal Quranic vision. Imam al-Ghazl offers a tract on bayn m buddila min alf al-ulm: the scholarly terms which have been changed,3 and points out how treasonable to itself qh becomes if stripped of its theological status as, literally, understanding. The one loyal to God is he for whom God becomes the hand with which he smites.4 Without this inner chivalry, this futuwwa, the outward is not even itself; it is simply uncomprehending law; or, as George Chapman put it, the law which is an ass.5 The Quran itself speaks of those purely exoteric beings who are like asses, carrying scrolls. (62:5) This should allow us to see that the ijtihd project, properly conceived, is the only authentic form of jurisprudential obedience to the God of scripture. The maq|id, the
R. Bauman, Fiestas de la reconquista en Andaluca y Amrica, Lamalif, Almera, 5, December 1992, 1720. Ab mid al-Ghazl, I^y Ulm al-Dn, Cairo, 1347ah, I, 2834. 4 For the ambitious classical understanding of this Bukhr ^adth quds see Abdal Hakim Murad (tr.), Selections from the Fat^ al-Br, M.A.T. Papers, London, 2000. 5 George Chapman (attr.), Revenge for Honour, London, 1654, III.ii.
2 3

8 | qur anic truth and the meaning of dhimma

purposes, of Gods law, do not change, for they reect aspects of His eternal nature. There will never be a time in which He does not require the protection of life, family, property, religion, and honour. Hence, Sunni Islam is dened, on the Ghazlian principle, precisely as the context of constant morally-oriented ijtihd. It is a theological axiom that this gate has indeed, as Imm al-Suy~ insisted, never been closed.6 The sign of Islams enactment of this primordial covenant on earth is Abrahamic, and more particularly Ishmaelite, since the universalizing implications of Ishmaels exile mean that the whole world, Hebrew and Gentile, forms part of an umma, which is, at the very least, ummat al-dawa, the umma-in-waiting, the community of those equipped to understand. According to a hadith the Muslims are told: Show piety in dealing with the protected peoples, those of the settled lands, the black, the crinkly-haired, for they have a noble ancestor and marriage ties [with us]. In his Sra, Ibn Hishm adds: by ancestry the Prophet referred to the fact that the prophet Ishmaels mother came from them.7 In the Ishmaelite vision, it seems that even the Kushites, elsewhere despised, are capable of a full and equal understanding. Hence the striking absence of signicant reference to the Arab people in the Quran. No Red Sea will divide the faithful from Egypt.8 Enterprises such as that of John Wansbrough, which seek to read the Islamic scripture as a narrative of election, are far from the mark, for the Quran is not the salvation history of a people; on the contrary, it is a universal history, mainly telling the stories of non-Arab protagonists. Alone among major world scriptures, it places the heroes of another ethnos at the centre of its story. It demands not a growth into Arab selfhood, but a growth into the monotheism which is mainly practiced by neighbouring Others. So complete is this inversion of older covenantal assurances that it would be possible to say that the signicant Other of the Quran is its own people: the sons of Ishmael. It is a document of radical prophetic autocriticism. The familiar principle is that of Montaigne: Everyone terms barbarity, whatever is not of his own customs; in truth it seems that we have no view of what is true and reasonable, except the example and idea of the customs of the country in which we live.9 But for the Quran, it is the people itself, not the neighbours, that comprise the barbaroi, the most inveterate gentile category. The jhiliyya against which it inveighs is a quintessentially Arab and autochthonous quality; Christians and Jews are not accused of it. To this we might add the startling fact that while Christian theology developed substantially in polemic against external rivals (the subtitle of Augustines City of God is against the pagans), Islamic theology emerged as a polemic against internal, Muslim error. The
6 Jall al-Dn al-Suy~, (ed.) Khall al-Mays, al-Radd al man ukhlida ilal-ar\ wa-jahila annal-ijtihd f kulli a|rin far\, Beirut, 1403/1983; W Hallaq, Was the gate of Ijtihad closed? International Journal of Middle East Studies 16, 1984, 341. But as Muhammad Hashim Kamali points out (Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, Islamic Texts Society, Cambridge, 2003 New Edition, 516), the maq|id alone cannot operate without the formal mechanisms of jurisprudence (u|l al-qh). And since the u|l do not exist externally to the madhhabs of their theorists, a maq|id-based ijtihd of the kind currently appropriate must respect the rival wisdoms of the madhhib as an indispensable source of energy, as well as the guarantor of continuity and methodological clarity. Islams machinery for supporting internal diversity has lessons for the harder task of relating to the external Other: only through full adhesion to the mainstream is a stable and authentic afrmation of difference possible. 7 A. Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A translation of Ibn Ishaqs Sirat Rasul Allah, Oxford UP, Oxford, 1955, 691. 8 For the Red Sea as a sign of Jewish apartness see Emmanuel Levinas, Difcult Freedom: essays on Judaism, Athlone, London, 1990, 137. 9 D. M. Frame, The Collected Works of Montaigne, Stanford, 1958, 1523.

qur anic truth and the meaning of dhimma | 9

kalm authors spent some time on the milal (rival religions), but their great doctrinal projects were not shaped in argument with them. Islam never heard the voice of a Celsus, and therefore never produced an Origen. It is no doubt this Ishmaelite universalism that shapes our scriptures vision of the eschatological ingathering of a diverse humanity to a single Banner of Praise. The Prophet is no stern Pantocrator, the role attributed to a wrathful Christ by the Book of Revelation. In the Bibles vision, humanity ees, crying out Hide us from the wrath of the Lamb!10 Instead, the Prophet appears as a merciful intercessor, to whom the nations ock, as he pleads with his Lord: Rabb sallim, sallim! Lord, save! Save!11 A long hadith which has been preserved by Imm al-Bukhr depicts the nations of mankind, distraught by the dies irae, hastening from one prophet to another, so that only the Final Messenger is able to say anything other than nafs, nafs: Myself, myself! His response to this throng of religiously diverse mankind is to pray for their relief and forgiveness.12 Considering the hadiths of the Intercession, Imm al-Murta\ al-Zabd (d.1791) concludes that: wa-kadhlika bqishshaft, al-hir annahu yushrikuhum fh baqiyyat al-umam: similarly, with the other instances of intercession, the evident meaning is that the other religious communities share in them.13 In this way Islam demonstrates, at the very end of time, its inclusive, Abrahamic embrace of the various religions of the world. It would be hard to imagine a fuller version of what Levinas calls consummation as act, the exaltation of the love of alterity.14 If the Blessed Prophet himself is gloried by this divine gift of plural intercession, it should follow that his followers are required to be the sign of a proleptic hospitality on earth. As he says, Whoever harms a member of a dhimma community shall have me as his adversary on the Day of Resurrection.15 Classical Islamic law, in its provisions for non-Muslims, both within and without the house of Islam, took itself to be the instantiation of the maq|id in this respect, for the Other as well as for the Self. Often the backdrop was the insistence on the just privileging of the most correct monotheism; and a good deal of implicit snobbery could ensue. The key term |ghirn (9:29) may indeed mean humbled, and Islamist and non-Muslim polemicists alike are insisting on this translation; but the term is contested; al-Mward himself, perhaps the leading political theorist of classical Islam, allows it to mean simply subject to the laws of the Muslim government.16 The word dhimma is at root an honourable and hospitable one, recalling the honour of the desert chieftain who gives the protection. Its connection with the root dhamma, to blame, is that the violation of a dhimma compact or covenant is considered blameworthy, madhmm; this is certainly Imm al-Bay\ws interpretation of the word dhimma at 9:8: ahdan wa-^aqqan yubu al ighflih.17 Imm al-B|r makes the following boast in his poem the Mantle (al-Burda):

Revelation 6:16; see also Rev 14; Mt 25:3146; Jn 5:22. Muslim, mn, 346. For a further exploration of this contrast between the two founders see Tim Winter, Jesus and Muhammad: new convergences, The Muslim World 99:1, January 2009, 2138. 12 Bukhr, Anbiy, 3; for conrmation that his general intercession will include non-Muslims, see Shams al-Dn alQur~ub, al-Tadhkira f a^wl al-mawt wa-umr al-khira, Cairo, 1352 ah, 247. 13 Al-Murta\ al-Zabd, It^f al-sda al-muttaqn bi-shar^ I^y ulm al-dn, Cairo, 1311 ah, 10, 494. 14 Jill Robbins, Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Immanuel Levinas (Stanford, 2001), 22931. 15 A^mad ibn anbal, Musnad. 16 Abul-asan al-Mward, al-A^km al-Sul~niyya, Cairo, 1978, 162. For the complex arguments over the meaning and temper of the word, see M. Bravmann, A propos de Koran IX, 29, Arabica 10, 1962, 915. 17 Abdullh al-Bay\w, Anwr al-tanzl wa-asrr al-tawl, Istanbul, 1329 ah, 248.
10 11

10 | qur anic truth and the meaning of dhimma

By him I have a safe-conduct [dhimma], having been named Mu^ammad; he who is most faithful in safe-conduct.18 Even a compact between a Muslim and a non-Muslim, outside the explicit context of dhimma, is to be a test of the believers honour. Commenting on the famous hadith of the three signs of the hypocrite, narrated by Bukhr and Muslim, which ends wa-idh hada ghadar, and when he enters a compact, he breaks it, Ibn Rajab al-anbal comments: The breaking of a pledge between a Muslim and another person is forbidden, even if the other party is an unbeliever.19 The unbeliever, then, can be ones neighbour, jr, a term fraught with intense signicance in this culture of hospitality. Where Quran 4:36, speaks of duties to the near and the distant neighbour, Ibn Rajab conrms the meaning that the two categories to be honoured here are Muslim and non-Muslim neighbours. The unbeliever, too, has ^aqq aljiwr, the right of the neighbour.20 And in a sound hadith narrated by Tirmidh and Ibn anbal, we learn that when Abdullh ibn Amr once slaughtered a sheep, the response of the Prophet, was hal ahdaytum minh li-jrinal-yahd? Have you given some of it as a gift to our Jewish neighbour?21 Moreover, on the core issue of forgiveness (afw) of nonMuslim others, Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz insists that this is no less Quranic a principle.22 Anecdotes abound of Muslim popular respect for non-Muslim ascetics, and for Christian ascetics in particular.23 No doubt this nds its support in Quran 5:85, which announces a positive, even a love relationship, between Muslims and Christians, because among them are priests and monks, and because they are not proud. Hence the Muslim worshipper Mlik ibn Dnr could be respectfully called the rhib [the monk] of the Arabs; just as the erudite Companion Kab al-A^br was honoured with the title rabbi (^abr).24 Few seem to have been shocked by the story of Ibrhm ibn Adham, one of the greatest early Muslim saints, who said, I learned the knowledge of God from a monk, whose name was Abba Simeon; such accounts were deemed perfectly deserving of inclusion in the hagiographies.25 It is here, rather than in our present-day reaction to dhimma codes, that we nd a reliable indicator of Muslim respect for the religious other. It is religious quality that should be the basis for our esteem for others, not abstract and soulless conceptions of rights. Again, Levinas puts it well: the ethical is the recognition of holiness.26 The honourable defence of the dhimma contract formed part of a medieval Ishmaelite vision of globalisation. The Ishmaelite prophet, as genetic heir to Egypt as well as the Hebrew line, is sent to all mankind, buithtu lil-nsi kffa.27 The great imperial Islamic orders of the past, from the Umayyad to the Ottoman, were in their diverse ways globalising but plural, and the honouring of the protection-covenants of the minorities allowed those minorities to evolve ourishing cultural and spiritual lives of their own. Sephardic
18 Sharaf al-Dn al-B|r, Burdat al-mad^, translated by Abdal Hakim Murad, The Mantle Adorned, Quilliam Press, London, 2009, 163. 19 Ibn Rajab al-Hanbal, Jmi al-ulm wal-ikam,Beirut, 1417/1996, II, 347. 20 Ibn Rajab, I, 261. 21 Narrated by Tirmidh and Ibn anbal; cf. Ibn Rajab, I, 265. 22 Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz, al-Tafsr al-Kabr, Cairo, 1934, XXVII, 263, to Quran 45:1415. 23 Abundant early examples are cited in Tor Andrae, In the Garden of Myrtles: Studies in Early Islamic Mysticism, State University of New York Press, Albany NY, 1987. 24 Ibid., 9. 25 Ibid., 12. 26 Levinas cited in Robbins, Is it Righteous to Be?, 235. 27 Bukhr, Tayammum, 1.

qur anic truth and the meaning of dhimma | 11

Jewry is one familiar example;28 another are the Orthodox churches under the Ottoman umbrella, which were protected externally from Latin crusade, while witnessing an enhanced internal authority over their members.29 Rejecting the Spencerian mirage of a necessary linear progression, Muslim empires did not share the British imperial desire to undertake the government of vast, uncivilised populations and to raise them gradually to a higher level of life;30 instead, they respectfully allowed them their own integrity. And considering our own modernity, Liberal democracy and the free market have at their disposal the resources to impose and defend their belief in their fullment, thus running the risk of regarding everything which they perceive as being other as archaeological remnants incapable of achieving the post-history nirvana.31 Whereas modern globalisation tends towards the annihilation of cultural diversity, the globalisation brought by classical Islam preserved it, and even lent it new energy. Moreover, Islamic globalisation encouraged dhimma communities to ower in religious ways, while the modern secular global forces have tended to produce spiritually weak sub-cultures. It is instructive to compare, for instance, Jewish life in eleventh-century Andalusia, to its equivalent after the European enlightenment (Maimonides and Freud are only two icons of this). Secularisation, intermarriage, assimilation, and many of the social forces which most worry traditional Jews, are consequences of the Enlightenment, not of the Quran. We might consider the case of France as one example of the exclusivist modern understanding of pluralism. In the name of the Republics internal mission civilatrice, the Islamic ideal of the modular society, a tapestry of self-regulating communities, is ofcially fought in the name of a single paradigm of French citizenship. The totalitarian implications are not far to seek. Here, for instance, are the disturbing words of Simone Weil, responding to plans to create a distinctive Jewish minority (what Ottomans might call a millet) in Vichy France: It is dangerous to consider the accepted premises as stable and to make them correspond to a stable modus vivendi. The existence of such a minority does not represent a good thing; thus the objective must be to bring about its disappearance, and any modus vivendi must be a transition towards this objective. In this regard, ofcial recognition of this minoritys existence would be very bad because that would crystallize it.32 Weil here, arguing against her own people in the hour of their need, upholds the Enlightenment ideal of convergent identity as the necessary foundation for a stable nation state. Charles Pasquas legislation against ^ijb and other symbols of religious identity in
Benjamin Disraeli, that damped Jew, was in the eyes of Victorian England instinctively pro-Muslim. See E. T. Raymond, Disraeli: The Alien Patriot, London, n.d. [1925], , p.35: For a moment we nd him resolved to join the Turkish army then ghting in Albania. The fancy of becoming an inverted Byron passed, but not the sympathy for the Moslem, an inheritance from his ancestors. 29 The millet system of the Ottoman Empire, which replaced Byzantium, enhanced the Orthodox Churchs power as ruler over its subjects. This was one reason for the Churchs opposition to the Greek War of Independence. Adamantia Pollis, Eastern Orthodoxy and Human Rights, Human Rights Quarterly 15:2, May 1993, 346. 30 Lord Hugh Cecil, cited in Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People, Penguin Books, London, 1998, 69. 31 Rusmir Mahmutcehajic, Bosnia the Good: Tolerance and Tradition, Central European University Press, Budapest, 2000, 15. See also his With the Other, Sophia: Journal of Traditional Studies 9:2, 2003, 2576. 32 Simone Weil, What is a Jew?, letter to the Vichy minister of education in November 1940; cited in Robert Coles, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1987, 48.
28

12 | qur anic truth and the meaning of dhimma

French schools and other republican spaces resembles a latter-day instantiation of this. The same ideal, intentionally, or, more usually, incidentally, currently presides over a global abolition of diversity hardly less striking than the loss of natural habitats. Of the six thousand languages currently spoken, fewer than three hundred may survive a century hence.33 Distinctions of dress, dialect, cuisine, body language, architecture, music, and folk idioms of a thousand subtle and vulnerable kinds: all are giving way to the logic of globalisation, which is corrosive of difference in practice, even where it afrms it in principle. The verse most often cited by Muslims, of course, is And we made you peoples and tribes that you might know one another. (49:13) But there is also a rich Quranic invocation of diversity as a sign of God, invoking not only the diversity of nature, but of mankind: And of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and colours. (30:22) Such diversity, redolent of a celebratory sense of Gods gift, was explored and sharpened by the rise of the ecumenical Islamic world, as shown by the immense ourishing of Turkish, Persian, and other literatures following their accession to Islam. (Ironically, the only poetry which was not qualitatively enhanced by Islam was the Arabic.) While V. S. Naipaul and other weavers of chauvinism condemn Islam as Arab imperialism, and propose a deep malaise in the souls of convert descendents, the reality suggests that Islam invigorated rather than destroyed the nations it slowly transformed. Compare , for instance, to Avestan hymns; compare, too, the Isfahan mosques to the barren, inhuman royal glories of Persepolis. If we use Aref Nayeds hermeneutical term ayatology, we will conclude that classical Islamic globalisation enhanced the legibility of God in the world, while modern globalisation blurs it.34 True, late modernity and postmodernity strain every nerve to announce the principle of diversity. Yet the content of such valorising of the Other is ambiguous. If only the Wests values are universal values, and they are expected to be applied throughout the world, then can there be any valid public, as opposed to merely private, difference? Further, can private difference, in individuals and social groups, ourish where public difference is discounted? Rooted in an attitude to the Bible as categorically supersessionist, authored by a God who has announced a new and much better type of salvation, itself a principle intensied by an Aristotelianism whose linear view of history and of the primacy of the rational self against the barbaric Other had already thrown up the empire of Alexander, Western views of linear progress have frequently invited a view of other cultures as picturesque (Oriental) remnants, at best, or as atavistic throwbacks to superstition. In this context, Rawls can make a small space for a non-liberal religious polity,35 but even this tentatively pluralistic liberalism is widely attacked by those who believe that a

33 For the massacre of the languages, see George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford University Press, London and New York, 1975, 52ff. 34 For more on Aref Nayeds concept of ayatology, see his Ayatology and Rahmatology: Islam and the Environment, in Michael Ipgrave (ed.), Building a Better Bridge: Muslims, Christians and the Common Good, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 2008, 161173; Compassion and Understanding in Islam, Islamochristiana 33, 2007, 137148; and Growing Ecologies of Peace, Compassion and Blessing: A Muslim Response to A Muscat Manifesto, Kalam Research and Media with the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, Dubai & Cambridge, 2010. 35 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1999), especially 758, where he outlines the constitution of an imaginary Kazanistan, as an example of a non-liberal but stable polity where Rawlsian denitions of justice are not satised, but where decency nonetheless prevails. A liberal international order, Rawls believes, should tolerate the existence of such states. This model promptly came under attack from universalists who hold that the only acceptable expression of decency is that enshrined in universal human rights ideas; cf. Patrick Hayden, John Rawls: Towards a Just World Order, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2002.

qur anic truth and the meaning of dhimma | 13

single model, the Jeffersonian, has emerged victorious from a blind Darwinian struggle that began with African Eve. Postmodernism, of course, exists in part to dismiss such Anglo-Saxon vainglory with a Gallic shrug. One recalls Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, roaring with laughter when reading Borges describe a Chinese categorisation of animals.36 The laughter begins as Occidental amusement at the Others rejection of the linear, and ends, once Foucault has launched his postmodern project, as self-mocking irony. Neither, however, will do morally, and therefore Islamically. The most substantial religious manipulations of postmodernism, in Levinas and de Certeau, are perhaps weakest where they seek to valorise the moral integrity of the Other, apparently insisting only on the duty of respect, in awe of the void of understanding that Fascism, that unsurprising culmination of the linear Promethean project of the Enlightenment, thought itself qualied to overcome. Other, more thoroughgoing postmodernisms, while asserting a radical pluralism (Lyotard), appear as axiomatically hostile to the Other in that they cannot allow the Other to be itself, unless that Other announce its own self-understanding in entirely non-kerygmatic terms. Without realism, we enter only into a series of relationships with ourselves, and pluralism becomes merely an interesting way of being monistic.37 How helpful is the pre-modern Muslim social model as a rival to such relativism? It is certainly the case that the dhimma contract allowed non-Muslims (originally monotheist scriptuaries, but ultimately other groups such as Hindus) an effective religious inviolability.38 Quasi-autonomous modules within a Muslim matrix, or, more usually, within the matrix of an opportunistic rulers power which also extended over a Muslim module which it legally privileged, these units maintained the full integrity of their own sacred spaces and laws; this is the sense in which Louis Gardet praises dhimma as a form of generosity, a participation in sacred hospitality.39 Shara courts had jurisdiction over cases which crossed religious boundaries; but such was their reputation that there are many cases recorded in Ottoman archives, for instance, of non-Muslims choosing to have recourse to them for disputes internal to a dhimma community.40 Public spaces privileged Ishmael, but did not repress other Abrahamic modules by denying them all right to a public authority. The model, however, while pluralistic in the sense that modernity and post-modernity cannot supply, namely, allowing multiple public sanctities, and guaranteeing the perpetuation of sacred difference, is not pluralistic in the modern rights-code sense of equality. There is an idealising tendency in modern Middle Eastern writing on Islam and Human Rights which, while missing the chance to probe deeply into Islams theology of difference, offers triumphant lists of Islams anticipations of various international human rights charters.41 This characteristic symptom of the complacency of much modern Arab selfMichel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Tavistock, London, 1970, xv. See C. Insole, Why Anti-Realism Breaks Up Relationships, Heythrop Journal 43, 2002, 2033. 38 For the inclusion of Hindus, see Yohanan Friedmann, Islamic Thought in Relation to the Indian Context, in Richard M. Eaton (ed.), Indias Islamic Traditions, 711-1750, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2003), 513. 39 Louis Gardet, La Cit musulmane: Vie sociale et politique, J. Vrin, Paris, 1954, 58. 40 Kemal iek, Living Together: Muslim-Christian Relations in eighteenth-century Cyprus as reected in the Sharia court records, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 4:1, 1993, 47: the dhimmis constantly used the sharia court even to solve disputes and simple matters between themselves. Even the monks came to the sharia court to solve their disputes. For the theoretical basis of the Ottoman vision of pluralism see Recep Sentrk, Toward an Open Science and Society: Multiplex Relations in Language, Religion and SocietyRevisting Ottoman Culture, Islm Arastrmalar Dergisi 6, 2001, 93129. 41 For instance, Abd al-Salm al-Tarmann, uqq al-Insn l-Islm, Beirut, 1968; Al Abd al-W^id Wf, uqq alInsn l-Islm, Cairo, 1967, translated as Human Rights in Islam, Riyadh, 1998.
36 37

14 | qur anic truth and the meaning of dhimma

perception is rooted in a reication of the turth, the Heritage, which in practice nullies the maq|id and minimises both the urgency and the possible scope of ijtihd. This is a good instance of the tendency discussed by Mu^ammad bid al-Jabr, who perceptively sets out the Arab intellectual dilemma as the sterile polarisation of two reied and irreconcilable forces: modernity, monopolised by the historic adversary in the West; and the turth, dened in a peculiarly essentialising and Arabocentric way. Given the hopelessness of a synthesis between a medieval theism and modern secularity, such Arabs retreat into fantasy and utopia, whether Bathist, Marxist or Islamist. The gulf between dream and tragedy results both in political failure, and in what he sees as the peculiarly distraught temper of the modern Arab soul.42 Jabrs solution lies in the Derridean reading of history. Instead of positing Islam and modernity as two radically disaggregated stories, he wishes to examine the genealogy of both. Critical reading may disillusion, or even, in Weberian terms, disenchant, but the sword cuts both ways. Neither past is properly represented through idealisation. There is wisdom, and brutal realism, in this assessment; yet it seems unclear how it can serve to deliver an authenticity that is more than sentimental. It resolves the antinomy between Islamic past and scientic present by a disguised triumphalism of the latter; and hence becomes little more than a variant on a subaltern project. More hopeful would be a re-reading of Jabr which stepped outside his self-critical Arabocentrism, and considered the Islamic universalism discussed earlier. The Arab world appears presently turned in on itself; not only does it fail to respond with enough nuance to the ideas of modernity, it is also largely oblivious to the eighty-ve percent of Islam which ourishes outside the Arab League. And it is among the ajam, the non-Arabs, that we may frequently nd the more faithful Ishmaelites; faithful we may say not in terms of piety, which is unmeasurable, but in terms of a willingness to see the revelation in a way that does not concretise the Arab cultural achievement as the only possible implementation of the Quran. Hence, for instance, the greatest Islamic poetic engagement with modernity comes mainly from Indians (Muhammad Iqbal), for the novel, from the Turks (Necip Fazl); and for lm, from the Iranians (Majidi). And in areas of ijtihd, particularly in areas of minority rights which are salient in many ajam territories, the non-Arabs seem to be at the forefront of developments. In Turkish divinity faculties the issues raised by religious dialogue are dealt with in an increasingly sophisticated way. In Indonesia the study of comparative religion began in a scientic way long before it did in any Arab institution, with the creation of an academic department for its study by Mukti Ali, a Javanese Quran-school student who, after a spell in Karachi, studied in Montreal under Wilfred Cantwell Smith.43 Through his inuence, and that of thinkers of both the Muhammadiya and the Nahdhatul Ulema tradition, a lively local platform of inter-religious theology developed, which contributed signicantly to the establishment of multi-party democracy in Indonesia and to other aspects of the nation-building process.44 Indonesian theology and ijtihd is simply more advanced than that of the Arabs; it is certainly not without voices that are unduly liberal, or too literalist, or too uninformed; but it is, by and large, superior, and has demonstrably borne fruit. The non-Arabs have an advantage, one might suggest, in that they are not the direct heirs
Mu^ammad bid al-Jabr, al-Khi~b al-Arab al-Mu|ir, Beirut, 1982. Ali Munhanif, Islam and the struggle for religious pluralism in Indonesia; a political reading of the religious thought of Mukti Ali, Studia Islamika 3:1, 1996, 79126. 44 Douglas E. Ramage, Politics in Indonesia: Democracy, Islam and the Ideology of Tolerance, Routledge, London and New York, 1995.
42 43

qur anic truth and the meaning of dhimma | 15

of the Abbasid cultural magnicence which, for most of the twentieth century, was coterminous with the glorious turth for Arab nostalgics. The greatness of non-Arab Islam, which is no less spectacular, is later: it is Mogul, Hausa, Ottoman, and Malay. For scholars raised with such memories, greatness is more recent than it is for the Arabs; and the idea of an ongoing Islamic success becomes therefore less alien. In addition, there is the fundamentalism factor: Salasm is Arabocentric by denition, reducing the ajam to client status, and offering few reasons to respect their cultural achievements. This may be one reason why Salast readings of scripture are less prevalent in the majoritarian, non-Arab umma. Salasts may claim that the response to Jabrs diagnosis will be to de-reify the Abbasids, and to appeal solely to the apostolic generations as the blueprint for Islamic reform. But the denial of real religious value to the late-comers (khalaf) is implictly a devaluation of the early Muslims (salaf) themselves, suggesting that they failed to plant successful seeds, producing only a crop of deviance and heresy. Pluralism is ruled out by such pessimism, which is therefore a poor basis for current ijtihd (if God allowed the entire Ottoman religious establishment to be in error, in law, spirituality, and even monotheism, then where is the Quranic God of providence?). Shaykh Sad Rama\n al-B~ has usefully examined this anti-plural, methodological error of Salasm, in his book al-Salayya.45 To devalue a thousand years of Muslim expertise, and an unfolding of learned reaction to an evolving world, is equivalent to denying higher mathematics in the name of the principle of number itself. As Enes Karic, currently dean of Sarajevos Theology Faculty, puts it: No time, no matter how distant it may be from the rst generation of recipients of the Quran, can be deprived of its own comprehension and perception. Traditional Islam views Islam as a river that ows equally for all those drinking her water and considers that they all have the same right to that river. While the modernists search for other rivers, the revivalists consider that it is good to drink the river water only at its spring. Unlike the modernists and the revivalists, traditional Islam follows the continuity: the whole river with all its tributaries is a single entity, and it is legitimate to drink its water at any point. [] In Islam, the source of religion is in the form of the divine word, not in the shape of a resurrected person appearing at one point in history. It also means that the divine word, given that it is a word, ows continuously and never stops owing. The rst generation did not put a dam on the course of this river, this word; the rst generation of Muslims did not channel this course in a binding direction, nor did it put a stamp on one nal understanding and reception.46 Let me give only one practical example of how this traditionalist Quranic readingand it is a traditionalism, not a fundamentalism or a modernismmight serve to render the
Sad Rama\n al-B~, al-Salayya: mar^alatun zamniyyatun mubraka l madhhab Islm, Beirut, 1980. Enes Karic, Essays (on behalf) of Bosnia, El-Kalem, Sarajevo, 1999, 239-40. 47 Dhimms are, of course, exempted from the zakt. The burden of the jizya in early Islam has not been possible to determine; but Wellhausen was convinced that it was a small amount (Julius Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall, London, 1925, 176.) The administration of the jizya was, in the rst century, and particularly during the reign of Umar I, a substantially ad hoc affair. See Daniel C. Dennett, Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1950), e.g. pp.38, 115, 120 for the jizya levied on converts to Islam. Ismail Faruqi suggests that jizya was less onerous than the zakt, see his Islam and Other Faiths, The Islamic Foundation, Leicester, 1998, 146. 48 M. Grianaschi, La valeur du tmoignage des sujets non-musulmans (dhimmi) dans lempire ottoman, Recueils Socit Jean Bodin 18,1963, 211323; Gudrun Kramer, Dhimmi ou citoyen: rexions rformistes sur le statut des non-musulmans en socit islamique, in A. Roussillon (ed.), Entre rforme sociale et mouvement national: identit et modernisation en Egypte (1882-1962), CEDEJ, Cairo, 1995.
45 46

16 | qur anic truth and the meaning of dhimma

dhimma regulations more visibly conformable to the maq|id. The dhimma privileges are hedged around with a set of legal disabilities, including the jizya tax,47 and most notably, restrictions on bearing witness directly against Muslims in court.48 Yet it needs to be pointed out that these provisions originated in a particular context in apostolic Islam, where the non-Muslims were identied with combatant or ex-combatant nations.49 The salaf were happy to exempt Christian Arabs from the jizya, when they participated in the jihd. In the modern context of nation-states emerging from colonial rule, the minorities can no longer be considered members of conquered peoples; indeed, like the Arab tribes of Byzantine Syria, they actively participated in the struggle for national liberation. In such a context, the reimposition of the dhimma strictures, unless specically sought by the minorities themselves, cannot be viewed as a faithful recreation of the practice of the early Muslims.50 This is not to say, however, that the classical dhimma legislation has little to teach us. We might want to ponder the possibility that a minority is paradoxically better treated when subject to mild legal disabilities. That may be the case in the United Kingdom, for instance, where a number of legal measures are in place to privilege Christianity as the majority religion. Under U.K. jurisdiction, a non-Christian cannot become head of state. Each session of Parliament opens with prayers of a Christian nature. The established Anglican Church enjoys automatic representation in the House of Lords, in the shape of an inuential bench of bishops. The bishops themselves are state appointees. Until the year 2008, the blasphemy laws covered only offenses against Anglican sensibilities. And the 1996 Education Act requires state schools to hold faith-based morning assemblies, providing: The collective worship required in the school [] shall be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character.51 It may not be coincidental that Britain has not yet produced the powerful neoFascist parties that campaign against Muslims in many other European states. On the whole, one detects little Muslim resentment of these legal disadvantages; in fact, many Muslims would rather live in a state which preserves at least some forms of theocratic certainty and privilege, to the French model in which secularism becomes a de facto state religion presiding over a society of individuals, with the various religious modules in society enjoying little or no ofcial acknowledgement or public rights, however much they may wish for them. To conclude: the Muslim record is built upon on a set of hospitable scriptural texts that recurrently produced a sustainable environment for non-Muslim faith. As Gardet and Massignon insist, the dhimma tradition was based on principles of honour and hospitality, and did not accord to minorities the status of second-class citizens.52 Yet the contemporary Muslim tendency to idealise past instantiations of the Shara has blinded us to aspects of the dhimma legislation which minorities today, by appealing to the maq|id, can understandably reject. The response, however, is not to claim that Western models are always appropriate and respectful when imposed upon cultures with non-Western roots; but rather to deploy the instruments of ijtihd to re-imagine dhimma in a new and more
Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, Holmes & Meier, York, 1982, p.5 of the editors introduction: what began as security restrictions became legal and social disabilities. 50 This understanding is developed in Fat^ Uthmn, al-Fikr al-Islm wal-ta~awwur, Cairo, 1961. For those who recognised the jurisdiction of the Caliph, the dhimma laws were in any case largely abolished by Abdulmecids ha~~-i humyn of 1856. 51 Education Act 1996, chapter 56, paragraph 386. 52 Gardet, La Cit musulmane.
49

qur anic truth and the meaning of dhimma | 17

authentic way. Muslim strategies for achieving this will differ; but we may reasonably hope that given the past record of our civilisation, a true pluralism will ourish more easily in Islamic soil than in places where the deep culture is historically more xenophobic. Arnold Toynbees immense erudition, coupled with his horror at the collapse of pluralism in mid-20th century Europe, allowed him to make the following remarks in his Reith Lectures for 1952: Now, in a world in which distance has been annihilated by the progress of Western technology, and in which the Western way of life is having to compete with the Russian way of life for the allegiance of all mankind, the Islamic tradition of the brotherhood of Man would seem to be a better ideal for meeting the social needs of the times than the Western tradition.53 The inauthenticity of modern Islamism, as represented by Khomeini, Qu~b and others, is demonstrated here more clearly than on any other issue. ;

53

Arnold Toynbee, The World and the West, London, 1953, 30.

18 | qur anic truth and the meaning of dhimma

Abdal Hakim Murad

Abdal Hakim Murad is Dean of the Cambridge Muslim College, the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer of Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University, and Director of Studies in Theology at Wolfson College. He was educated at Cambridge, Al-Azhar and London universities. He is a prolic author and translator. He has authored Bombing Without Moonlight: The Origins of Suicidal Terrorism (Amal Press, 2008), and has also edited The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and (with Richard Harries and Norman Solomon), Abrahams Children: Jews, Christians and Muslims in Conversation (T&T Clark/ Continuum, 2006). His translations of classical Islamic texts include Imam Al-B|rs Burdah in The Mantle Adorned (Quilliam Press, 2009); and Imam Ab amid Al-Ghazls I^y Ulm al-Dn with The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife (Book XL) (1989) and Disciplining the Soul and Breaking the Two Desires: (Book XXII and XXIII) (1995), both published by the Islamic Texts Society. Abdal Hakim Murad is a leading gure in inter-faith activity, notably as one of the signatories to the Common Word statement, and is also a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4s Thought for the Day. ;

KAL AM RES EA R CH & MEDIA

K N OW LE D GE VILL AGE, D UB AI

Kalam Research & Media is a collegial think tank and training centre based at Knowledge Vilage in Dubai and dedicated to research, education, content development, and capacity building in core areas such as Islamic theology, philosophy, science, inter-faith, scriptural reasoning, hermeneutics, and conflict resolution. Kalam Research & Media Block 3, 1st Floor, Executive Office 09 P.O. Box 502221 Knowledge Village Dubai, UAE Tel: +971 (0)434 2379 www.kalamresearch.com